Hi, I’m Sean, the website guy here at Salsaddiction and this is the second in a series of blogs about the new website.  In the first blog, I talked a bit about WordPress, the carousel and now plan to introduce the sliding drop down.

This is where a lot of interaction with the website will happen and includes:

• (A) Logging into your account or (B) registering
• (C) Checking your newsletter subscription
• (D) Sending any of our instructors an email
• (E) Checking your orders
• (F) Updating your address
• (G) Searching the website

And here’s a little secret – if you click anywhere on the background of the drop-down it will scroll back up!

The amount of technology that goes into making the drop down is quite amazing, all of it pretty much open source and free:

• First, jQuery, that awesome javascript library is used everywhere, from sliding the panel down, to the secret click on the background to make it scroll back up, and is used heavily by the code that support the rest of the goodness below.
• The sliding panel was original created by WebKreations but then converted into a WordPress pluginand then heavily customized to use a bunch of other plugins like:
  • FS Contact Form for the contact form.
  • Woocommerce for the shopping cart solution and customer management (more in a later post)
  • WP Mailman, again, heavily modified for our own use and it takes care of the subscribe and unsubscribes and integrates with the Mailman mailer.  (More in a later blog post)
• And lastly, Tooltipsy which is used for all the helpful tooltips found around the site.

It is pretty crazy how much javascript gets loaded in the background.

Cheers, Sean